My son Seth Bender, to whom Writing It Real is dedicated, would have turned 31 this October 1. He died in a snowboarding accident December 27, 2000, the year he was 25. In the months following the tragedy, the only connection I could feel strongly was to the sun. Certainly, it could have been because the name of the fiery center of our solar system is a homonym for son, the young man born from my center. But after the event that made me more vulnerable than I had ever been, it seemed like Seth was talking to me through each appearance of the sun through clouds, in its rising up and setting down. Each day, though I had little other structure in my days, I made sure to watch the sunrise and the sunset.

Family, friends, colleagues and even strangers offered much kindness to soothe me, but integrating loss is a solitary task. For me, this work began a month after Seth died when I read the words of a shaman named Martin Prechtel in an issue of The Sun. In the magazine’s interview article, Prechtel says: ”If you are able to feed the other world with your grief, then you can live where your dead are buried….the way we help the other world continue is by feeding it with our beauty.”

I didn’t know what these words meant, but they hooked me and seemed to contain something I had to learn. For beauty, I turned to reading poetry. In a book I’d taught from, I rediscovered ‘‘The Voice of Robert Desnos,” in which Desnos repeats the phrase ”I call” as he speaks with passion about his helplessness to change what has saddened him. At a time when I thought I had no words for what I felt, I wrote:

I call to the ski slopes of Breckenridge;
I call to the trees on the slopes of Breckenridge;
I call to the snow and the ice hanging in their branches;
I call to the snow on the run and the melted layer iced over;
I call to my son, to my son in his thermal clothing, to my son
twenty-five years old and snow boarding, headed into the trees.
I call to him to tumble off the board, not to worry
about looking clumsy, not to worry about finishing the run.
I call and I call, but he does not hear me.

I call over the weeks between then and now
to the hospital and time of death: 3:30 December 28th 2000
but my son does not tumble where I want him to.

 I call clear as the moon, single eye I howl beneath, a coyote
licking pebbles from a wound. I call and I call.
The wound weeps holy water over my eyelids, hands,
knees, feet that carry me the rest of my days.

In the snow, I see sadness crystallize, hear my voice
force the follicles in my body to burst along their single seams,
spread seeds, the seeds I see in sunlight and my son

After writing this poem, I realized I had needed to accept the moment of my helplessness as a mother. Howling the hopelessness out in poetry, I came again to the sun. It seemed to represent what is all encompassing, what is larger than any of us, something that has already transformed loss.

I continued to make sure I was by my window at sunrise and sunset and gained strength from the way I felt no barrier between the sun and myself. Weeks later, while I was reading Walt Whitman, the ending of ”Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” struck me because again I witnessed the taking of physical action to confront despair:

Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter

Echoing Whitman’s language and his willingness to physically move into his poetic state, I wrote to become a uniter of now and before:

Out of daily steps and out of drives
on highways, out of hours’ rocky patches
and moments made of weeds, memories come.
Sometimes, I sing the evening
I visited my son and watched his friends
working in his kitchen with hops and yeast
and recipes downloaded from the Internet,
the carboys they showed me topped
with see-through tubes and shiny copper
for reading yeast’s performance.
Sometimes I sing their logs of sugar
content and bottled batches.

I sing the way the young men sterilized
the bottles they used, invited people
for harvests of oatmeal stout and porter.
I sing each week they went to school
between their Sunday fests.

Long and deep, I mourn and wake to sing
the sun to rise, to thank my son for time
he’s spent inside my dreams

I sing, I sing to do what he was doing,
siphoning good spirit from the sediment.

When I finished my poem, I saw that not only did I hurt from profound helplessness to keep Seth from dying, I also feared losing my memories of him, another death. With the sun once again in my poem, I also realized how much the affirmation of its coming again after darkness meant to me.

Months later, still striving to find my way through grief and how it would lead to knowing how to feed my dead with the beauty of this world, I discovered Rilke’s elegy poems, especially, ”The First Elegy,” which includes these lines:

In the end, those who were carried off
early no longer need us:
they are weaned from earth’s sorrows
and joys, as gently as children
outgrow the soft breasts of their
mothers…

The poem made me think about weaning Seth at fifteen months, about how outgrowing nursing didn’t mean Seth had outgrown my love. I came to realize that giving up future stages in our lives together didn’t mean giving up my love for him.

Soon after, I found a box of papers I had saved from Seth’s high school days. A postcard he sent from summer bicycling camp read:

Hey Dudes,
I hope you’re having as much fun as me. We are at Lakedale campground on San Juan. My writing is so bad because I’m dodging bees. The riding’s been pretty good (of course I have the heaviest load).

Love, Seth

I hung the postcard by my desk. Seth’s message was clear to me. It all happens at once: having fun, dealing with what’s real, taking on the job life throws at you. Moments I think, ”What if?” I can dodge the bees that want to feed on grief and go on.

As with all my years of parenting, love helps me carry a heavy load and grows full to overflowing. I can live where my dead are buried. I can feed the other world with this one’s beauty. It is no surprise that in my mind, the day Seth was writing his postcard was a sunny one. I see the perspiration on his upper lip, the way his tank top has a wet triangle down the front. He has taken his bike helmet off while he rests and writes, sunlight shining through his curls.